Danny Sweat

On August 21, 2009, police in Houston, Texas arrested 29-year-old Danny Sweat after they seized a substance from him that field-tested positive for cocaine.

On August 24, 2009, Sweat pled guilty in Harris County Criminal District Court to a charge of possession of a controlled substance. He was sentenced to 60 days in the Harris County Jail.

In 2015, the Harris County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit was informed that the Houston Police crime lab had tested the substance in 2010 and found no illegal drugs.

The prosecution informed Sweat’s defense attorney and joined in a state-law petition for a writ of habeas corpus seeking to vacate Sweat’s conviction. The trial judge recommended that the writ be granted and on September 16, 2015, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted the writ and vacated the conviction.

On October 15, 2015, the prosecution dismissed the charge against Sweat.

About the Registry

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.

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We welcome new information from any source about exonerations already on our list and about cases not in the Registry that might be exonerations.